This months T-SQL Tuesday is hosted by Kenneth Fisher and is all bout our first technical job. You can click the image above for the invite details and find out more about the monthly blog party!
I suppose I have very mixed feelings about my first technical job. Just before I moved into the role I was working shifts doing industrial printing, as much as I loved it I was desperate to move into IT. Just by chance a manager had remembered that my CV contained some college courses in Computer Studies and I that had some experience of Visual Basic, after a lunchtime interview one day I moved into a hybrid developer/support role.
The main focus of the role was implementing data processing solutions. Data was captured from two source systems, extracted to floppy disk and imported into a large database (MS Access, yes you read that right) before being output back again to files on floppy disk and transferred via mainframe jobs to their intended recipients.
To say the process was prone to error is an understatement. Things blew up constantly and as a result we were often making fixes on the fly (the kind of fixes that were powered by hopes and prayers more than anything else). As a result the days would often be long for everyone, days off were often interrupted by phone calls and it's no surprise that stress was all too commonplace.
We were also extremely underpaid for the work we were doing. In fact the final nail in the coffin as it were was when a manager informed me there was good and bad news after my annual appraisal. The good news was that I'd received a bonus (woohoo!) but the bad news was I'd also got a pay rise (come again?). The pay rise was, well to be frank I took it as an insult and the manager looked at me and told me that I should be aware of what I needed to do, and shortly after leave I did.
It would be very easy to write a lengthy post on how things should have been done differently, but that's experience for you and if I'm brutally honest I didn't learn some of the lessons until years later. But I started this post by saying I had very mixed feelings because despite all of the chaos I genuinely have some very fond memories of my time there.
I worked with some amazing people; some of whom I remain very close friends with today and whenever we talk we always seem to end up in fits of laughter of some of the, shenanigan's we got up to shall we say! In fact I'd go as far as to say that unless I'm prompted to write a blog post about the experience and need to give it some serious thought, I don't even think about the negatives.
So after all that, I'm not sure what the message is, or even if there's supposed to be one. It was a very mixed bag of fun and games (depending on your definition of fun) and ultimately I learnt a lot from it even if I didn't realise it at the time. The funny thing is if you'd have told me then that my future career was with SQL Server and not Visual Basic and Access I'd have laughed at you but maybe it goes to show that it doesn't matter how you get from A to B, as long as you get there, alternatively it might just mean you never know where you're going to end up!
